TIME isn't work $12 a share, much less the $23-24 it has been trading at recently. In it's first quarterly earnings report since becoming an independent company, it reported GAAP earnings of minus 67 cents per share. Non-GAAP earnings were reported as plus 30 cents per share, but one of the major "items" excluded from the non-GAAP figure was the fallout from the demise of one of the three major wholesalers who put TIME's magazines on store shelves. This was the second of the former "big four" wholesalers to disappear in the past five years due to declining retail sales of magazines. This is not some random event of which TIME was an innocent victim, but rather a direct result of the lack of consumer demand for the products of TIME and other publishers.

The two most profitable pieces of any magazine's business have always been advertising sales and newsstand sales, and both have seen substantial declines across the industry in every year since the financial crisis. There is absolutely no possibility of growth in the core business here, which is why TWX cut this division out of the company after failed attempts to sell it. That they managed to force TIME to borrow over a billion dollars to pay TWX shareholders a "special dividend" on the way out only makes the situation more dismal. The company's own CEO Joe Ripp was quoted by recode last week as saying that the company "needs to be saved." Not exactly the usual CEO bluster.

The only hope here would be to leverage the admittedly iconic brands (Time, People, Sports Illustrated, etc.) into new forms of media that can somehow grow the dollars they can command from readers and advertisers. One struggles to imagine how they do this as an independent, debt-laden company run by a bean-counter whose core competence is apparently cost-cutting, when they couldn't do it as the corporate sibling of movie studios, cable networks and music labels.

Even based on non-GAAP quarterly earnings of 30 cents, the stock is trading at a P/(E) multiple of around 19.5 while AAPL, which is currently taking record pre-orders for its iPhone 6 product line, trades at 16.4 times. Insanity.